Sleep'n'cycle in children

In the last decades, growing evidence has supported the hypothesis that sleep plays a functional role in the consolidation of memory, including procedural memories and motor learning in particular. Regarding the latter domain, available data suggest that sleep promotes the offline processing or reprocessing of fine-motor skills (e.g., finger tapping, mirror tracing). However, corresponding data on gross-motor skills involving whole body movements (e.g., bicycling, skiing) remain extremely scarce, despite their utmost importance in children’s development. In this perspective, our proposal addresses the following question: Is there a functional role of sleep in the consolidation of real-life gross-motor skills in children? To investigate our hypotheses 20 children (9-10 years) will be tested by a combined between- and within-subjects design either in a sleep or in a wake condition after learning to ride the inverse steering bicycle, requesting major adaptation of the whole body motoric system. Gross-motor performance will be quantified in collaboration with the Department of Sports and Kinesiology by a specially designed bicycle that allows to precisely assess bicycling trajectories and riding behavior (http://www.sleepscience.at/en/research). By sophisticated quantitative EEG analyses techniques we will be able to identify neurocognitive key mechanisms during learning, consolidation and subsequent gross-motor retrieval. The proposed project aims at investigating the impact of sleep on gross-motor learning in children by means of an innovative and ecologically valid task: inverse steering bicycling. The collected data will allow new insights in cognitive functioning of children and elucidate whether gross-motor learning is indeed supported by sleep as theoretical frameworks indicate.